Corrugated box manufacturers use "finishing" machines to form collapsed boxes from semi-rigid sheets of corrugated material. The boxes are manufactured and shipped to the end user in a knocked down (flattened) state, for later process steps by which the boxes are erected to form desired container configurations. It is typical that the boxes leaving the finishing machine are stacked in bundles. The bundles are then grouped together in stacks for shipment or storage.
In order to improve the stack quality of the bundles, it becomes desirable for the bundles to be squared, so the edges of the boxes at the leading, trailing and side surfaces of the bundle are aligned. A properly "squared" bundle thus has its end and side surfaces perfectly square with the top and bottom surfaces of the bundle. Squared bundles are easy to handle and organize into bundle stacks. However few finishing machines have the capability of forming perfectly squared bundles. Even if the finishing machine initially produces nicely squared bundles, operations downstream often result in the bundles being jostled out of square. Boxes within the bundles become slightly skewed or misaligned during handling. The side and end edges of the bundle are often not square with the top and bottom bundle surfaces.
To solve this problem, workers are sometimes stationed along the typical conveyor used to deliver bundles from the finishing machine to a stacking station. The workers attempt to manually shift the boxes within the bundles to square the bundle sides and ends before either stacking the bundles or feeding the bundles to a stacking machine. This is a tedious and time consuming task, often resulting in seriously slowing production, and adding injury risk to the workers. Yet the task must be performed because untidy bundles will not stack as fast or as well and do not produce a quality looking pallet load.
An object of the present invention is therefore to provide a machine that may be situated downstream of a finishing machine and along a bundle conveyor to square successive bundles.
A further object of the present invention is to provide such a machine that will center bundles on the conveyor.
A still further object of the present invention is to provide such a machine that may be operated rapidly enough so as not to slow down the finishing machine production.